21
SOLDIERS OR SERVANTS
“How long are we going to be out here?” Feliks asked two mornings later. A good question.
Nikita wanted a bath, badly, and he tried to tell himself it had nothing to do with the remembered feel of Katya’s face against his shoulder, the urge to have her do it again…and for him to smell like soap when she did. He also wanted a bed; the cold bunkroom back at the base was starting to sound heavenly.
He couldn’t complain about the food, though. Fresh game roasted over the fire was far preferable to SPAM and cafeteria slop. Sasha, who had no doubt been a talented hunter before, had become successful in a way that was uncanny, and inhuman.
But Nikita knew that they were out here for reasons besides teaching Sasha how to take down stags with his bare hands.
Philippe lifted his head from his breakfast, licked a bit of rabbit grease from the corner of his mouth, and glanced around their circle, gaze cautious. He knew what Nikita was thinking, and his face took on that careful expression he wore whenever he told them something he thought they didn’t want to hear. “Right then.” He wiped his hands on the bit of rag he’d spread across one knee – because he was the kind of asshole who used a napkin in the middle of the woods – and cleared his throat.
“As you’ve all probably guessed,” he said. “It was important that Sasha meet his wolves on their turf, and have a chance to learn how to work together with them as a pack. It’s been a successful endeavor, I think we can all agree.” He looked at Sasha almost proudly.
Sasha, by contrast, was staring off through the trees, humming quietly under his breath and scratching the omega wolf behind the ears, unconcerned.
“Get to the point,” Nikita prompted.
“Very well. I’ve told you that I can see things that are coming. Not distinctly, and not exactly. But I do know that battle is coming to Stalingrad. It will be long, and it will be brutal. It will be chaos…and chaos is always a very good time in which to accomplish extraordinary things.”
Everyone around the fire sat up straight.
Katya dropped the rabbit leg in her hand; it tumbled to the pine needles and one of the wolves slunk in to gobble it up unobtrusively.
Sasha had turned a narrow-eyed look on the old man. “You mean–”
“Take the city,” Philippe said.
“Christ,” Ivan said. “Are you serious? He’s serious, isn’t he?”
“This is what you’ve all wanted,” Philippe argued, spreading his hands to include all of them. “You want to take down the Bolsheviks, well, it starts with a city, my friends. And then another city follows, and then another.”
Katya, white-faced, said, “Generally, when someone overthrows a government, they have their government planning to replace it.”
“Quite right, my dear. And there will be one, but all of us here are soldiers or servants. Not leaders, to be sure.”
“Hey,” Feliks protested.
“Your master,” Nikita guessed, a grim sort of dread settling in his belly. “You want to wake him up and put a crown on his head, don’t you?”
Philippe grinned at him. “And what’s wrong with that? He’s more devoted to the Romanovs than even you, my dear captain.”
Nikita snorted. “Who is he?”
But he knew…in some way. An awful, crawling sort of certainty. The sort of thing that he’d suppressed because it was too terrible to consider.
His hand went to his pants pocket, the hard, cool shape of the bell there, a talisman that was proof of what the old man was about to say.
“You haven’t guessed, yet?” Monsieur Philippe asked, smiling – always smiling, damn him. “The most famous of Russian vampires. My master, and now Sasha’s. Grigory Yefimovich Rasputin.”
~*~
Night before last, Kolya had pulled Nikita aside before bed, when the others were settled down, and the fire had been doused. Only the barest hint of moonlight had lit his face, his eyes shining like onyx in his shadowed face. But Nikita had been able to read his disquiet well enough.
“You told her,” Kolya had said, and it hadn’t been a question.
“She’d already figured it out.” Which had been only partially a lie.
Kolya snorted. “She’s Red Army, Nik. And a stranger.”
“She’s an orphan. She has nobody but us now.”
Kolya tilted his head. “You think she cares for you so much she would betray her country?”
“The country betrayed her.”
“If you say you trust her, then that’ll have to be good enough for me.” It sounded threatening, though.
Nikita swallowed, throat dry. “I trust her.”
Kolya had stared at him a long moment, then finally nodded and went to find his bedroll.
In the face of the revelation that Rasputin was not only alive, but a vampire, talk of Whites and treason seemed downright mundane.
~*~
Silence reigned for a full minute; Nikita counted it off in his head.
It was Pyotr of all people who broke the silence. “Rasputin’s dead,” he said in a small voice.
“Poisoned, shot, and drowned,” Ivan added, scowling. “No one could survive all that. They did an autopsy after they pulled him out of the river.”
“An ordinary man could not have survived all that, you’re right,” Philippe said, patient. “But Rasputin is no ordinary man, as I’ve told you.”
“The tsarevich,” Kolya said in a strangled voice. “Prince Alexei. He had trouble with bleeding…”
It was silent another beat, as the weight of that fact landed on all of them.
Oh God.
“He saved the little prince’s life on more than one occasion,” Philippe said, still calm and patient, a schoolteacher in front of a room of dim-witted pupils. “The blood of a vampire has amazing restorative and healing properties. When he was grown, Rasputin would have turned Alexei. Willingly,” he added. “He would have been the most powerful tsar this nation had ever seen, able to rule for centuries, strong enough to survive any assassination attempt, guided by the wisdom of all the immortals who came before him.” He sighed. “What a waste. What a beautiful thing wasted.”
“Prince Alexei is dead,” Nikita said, tone cold, though his insides boiled with fear and agitation. “So it looks like we’re short one immortal tsar.”
Philippe turned to him, smile becoming almost smug. “Wait until you meet Our Friend Grigory. You’ve not met anyone wiser, I assure you.”
“Wait.” Sasha, silent until now, frowned and said, “Didn’t the tsar’s own family kill – try to kill – Rasputin?”
“Yeah,” Nikita said, “they did.”
“A well-intentioned, but misguided mistake,” Philippe said. “They thought the tsar’s relationship with Rasputin fueled the revolution–”
“It did,” Nikita said.
“It didn’t matter!” Philippe shouted. Actually shouted. For the first time since meeting the man, Nikita saw his face color with anger, saw his eyes flash, nostrils flaring as he breathed. In an odd way, it was a comfort to see that he was, in some ways at least, human. “The revolution would have happened anyway. And Rasputin could have – if he’d been there…” He sank back down onto his rotted-log seat, shoulders slumping. He was so composed it was easy, sometimes, to forget his age, but he looked it now, hunched and tired.
“You didn’t know him,” he said, quiet and defeated. “You didn’t know any of them. How could you understand?”
“So tell us about it all, goddamn it,” Nikita said. Seeing Philippe like this had taken the edge off his anger, but he was still frustrated to a point of violence.
“Alright.” The old man nodded, and he told them, finally.
~*~
As far as anyone knew, be they generals or common citizens, Philippe Nazier-Vachot left Russia at the tsar’s insistence, settled down quietly somewhere, and then died. Of course, this hadn’t happened. And eventually, when it became clear to him that the royal family was threatened by rumors, a restless population, and the ever-more-daring Bolsheviks, he shaved off his trademark beard, adopted a new set of clothes, and snuck back to the capital to see what he could learn about the unrest.
If you knew who to ask, you could tap into limitless fonts of gossip, none of it consistent, save in one area. The monarchy was failing. One person would swear that it was because “the fiend” Rasputin had enchanted the tsar and tsarina, that he slept with Alexandra and controlled Nicholas like a puppet. But the next person you met would swear it was because the Bolshevik cause was gaining traction: the proletariat was tired of dying in a monarch’s useless wars. There was a pervading sense that, though Russians had long resisted the royal push to become a more Westernized nation, their country was behind the times. And Nicholas, too tentative, too compassionate, too soft, was arguably the least Russian tsar in all of Romanov history.
Nicholas’s kindness, Philippe realized, his tendency to wait and think things to death, would be his downfall.
It was time to meet the starets who charmed everyone’s wives into bed, who drank wine to excess, and who was holding the nation in rapture.
That meeting happened in the chic salon of monarchist couple General Yevgeny Bogdanovich and his wife. The general was a member of the Council of Ministers, a warden of St. Isaac’s Cathedral, and a publisher of a series of monarchist-orthodox publications. He and his wife hosted lavish open breakfasts, always teeming with gossip-hungry guests, a select few of which were invited to stay for dinner…which was when the real juicy tidbits were discussed over too much wine and eight-course meals.
Philippe went to several breakfasts to get the lay of the land, and on the morning when everyone was excitedly discussing Rasputin’s appearance at dinner, he used a little magic to charm his way into an invitation.
The general’s sister, Yulia, a maid-of-honor to the tsarina, was in attendance that night, along with Nicholas’s valet, Nickolai Radtsig. They talked openly of the way the tsar’s minsters argued with him, of the wild, lecherous things that happened at the palace. Philippe watched the glee and malice in their eyes, and he knew they were nothing more than rumors. Humans pumped out a certain sickly stink when they lied like that, and it wouldn’t have taken a bodark to sniff out these liars. People loved scandal; and people loved ruining a ruler…right up until their heads were on the chopping block. These poor idiots hadn’t thought far enough ahead to their own demises yet. Philippe didn’t pity them.
Finally, just before dinner was served, Rasputin arrived.
He showed up red-faced, a little unsteady, and smelling of wine.
And the moment he walked in the door, Philippe knew he was a vampire.
He pulsed with energy, and he was drunk not just on wine, but probably blood, too, his eyes dilated, his smile lazy with pleasure.
He’d looked up, locked gazes with Philippe, and his large, unearthly gray eyes had held a moment’s lucid understanding. Two powerful beings acknowledging one another across a crowded room.
The starets had horrific table manners: shoveling food into his mouth with his hands, smearing grease on his clothes and the table linens, talking with his mouth full and spitting crumbs. And yet he charmed everyone at the table, everyone leaning toward him, listening to his bad poetry. Even the writers who would later claim to have been uncomfortable during the dinner had stars in their eyes; Philippe envied his ability to enchant them so effortlessly – and so many at once!
When they were taking port in the drawing room after dinner, Philippe sidled up to the man – the vampire – and asked, “Do the royal couple know what you are?”
“Of course.” His voice was resonant; he spoke like someone who knew exactly what sort of power he held over others.
“Have you enchanted them?”
Rasputin looked offended. “Why should I? They listen to me. They value me, and what I can offer.” He turned to face Philippe, expression sympathetic. “They were very sorry to lose you, my friend. May I tell them you’re well? I’m sure they’d love to see you.”
“You may tell them, yes, but I can’t risk seeing them. For their own sakes.”
Rasputin sighed and nodded. “You’re a mage. What have you forseen?”
This was the part that pained him. The thing that had brought him back to Russia. “Death stalks the Romanov family. Before tonight, I feared that was you.”
Rasputin smiled, and the chandelier glinted off his yellow fangs. “So long as I’m alive, the royal family have nothing to fear.”
~*~
“You see,” Philippe said sadly. “Rasputin was the only thing standing between the royal family and their demise. If Yusupov hadn’t tried to kill him, he could have prevented the massacre.”
~*~
The day was wasting, the sun climbing higher, starting to feel warm, finally, like true spring.
Nikita had no idea what to say, nor even what to think. He scuffed the toe of his boot through the dirt and tried not to think about his empty, clenching stomach. In all the talking, he’d forgotten to eat breakfast – as usual.
Birds called; somewhere water rushed, a light, musical sound that was a creek or stream.
Finally, Sasha got to his feet with the easy, disquieting grace of a thing born in the forest. “We’re going to go and dig up Rasputin, aren’t we? Wake him up. Lead him back to Stalingrad. Win the battle…and then Russia. This is your plan?”
Philippe smiled, pleased. “Why yes, it is. But first I would like for us to conduct a training exercise. To prepare.”
Nikita sighed and heard his brothers do the same.
Katya fingered her rifle absently, compulsively, expression carefully blank, but face white as clean linen.
“Alright,” Sasha said. “Let’s do it.”